


Half and Half makes One

by InsertSthMeaningful



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Childhood Friends, Dragon!Erik, Erik is a Sweetheart, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Honestly Charles What Are You Thinking, Interspecies Romance, M/M, Memory Alteration, Prince!Charles, Rating May Change, Tags May Change, raven!Raven
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:49:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27697193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsertSthMeaningful/pseuds/InsertSthMeaningful
Summary: Once upon a time, a young Prince called Charles found a dragon egg.It is only natural for Charles to hatch the dragon and take care of him. Aided in his efforts by his governess Lady Raven, he raises Erik as his companion and soulmate.However, fate rarely takes a linear path. Years later, Charles and Erik find themselves further apart than they ever could have foreseen.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, Raven | Mystique & Charles Xavier
Comments: 14
Kudos: 20





	Half and Half makes One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DoctorMagenta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoctorMagenta/gifts).



> I blame Nio for enabling me and thank the lovely [FlightInFlame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightinflame/pseuds/flightinflame) for giving this a beta 💙  
> No, I do not care that this first part is 8k in Raven's POV and that virtually no one will read it.

“Raven! Lady Raven! Look, there flies a dragon!”

At first, Raven could not believe her corvid ears. Had her royal child charge just claimed to have spotted one of those mystical creatures which had vanished off the face of the Earth eons ago? Impossible – they had been hunted down and slaughtered to the last specimen by the knights of the humans who wanted their hides for leather boots and their teeth for jewellery. None of them could have survived such persecution.

However, she had barely looked up to the sky when a shadow glid over her, enormous and dark. She didn’t even shriek with fright, so petrified was she by the apparition whose wings seemed to span the sky from one corner to the other.

A dragon. An honest-to-the-gods live dragon was soaring over the forest, and she was sitting here in a canopy and contemplating the meaning of life while the boy she was supposed to take care of roamed the ground like a sitting duck, ready to be plucked off the earth as a free, dragon-bite-sized meal.

Heart beating a staccato in her chest, Raven spread her wings and plummeted forth from her crow’s nest of greening twigs. There, between a blueberry bush and the base of a fir tree, her seven-year-old child charge cowered and stared into the open sky in oblivious wonder. His eyes, blue as though they had set their minds to reflecting the firmament, were tracking the fire-spewing creature’s descent into a far-away valley.

With a stroke of her wings, Raven was by his side and cramping her claws into the lush grass. “My Lord-” Anxiously, she clacked her beak- “are you hurt?”

“No.” Finally, the dragon had disappeared behind a mountain peak, and the boy turned his gaze to her. “It didn’t even look at me! It just- just- flew up and away and didn’t even spare me a glance!”

“I don’t see how that is a bad thing. Be glad it didn’t decide on lunching on you, my Lord.”

Sighing, the boy blew a lock of his unruly auburn hair out of his face. “Ugh, Lady Raven, you’re no fun. I wanted to take one of its scales!”

“Did you now?” Raven plucked a stray feather out of her glistening plumage and discarded it on the ground before she stretched and her bones creaked and she had morphed into her approximately human form. Smiling in the least threatening way she could manage, she bent down and took the boy’s hand. “Come on now, Charles. We’re supposed to be back for tea, and I don’t suppose you want to be late – or do you?”

“No…” The Prince trailed off, glancing down the hillside covered by thick clusters of ferns and firs. “But it landed down there. I saw it! Lady Raven, Miss, please, can’t we go have a look?”

Raven ground her teeth. Really, how had she deluded herself into taking this babysitter job? She was simply not cut out for it – her impulse to pick the boy up right here and now, Prince or not, and drag him back to his parents crying and screaming stood testimony to that.

She released one long, annoyed breath. “Alright then. Fine. But let’s try not to get eaten by a dragon.”

“Yes, Lady, thank you so much, thank you!” This said, Charles wrenched his hand from her grasp and started down the forest slope at a breakneck speed. The fern leaves rustled in protests as he brushed past them and was soon swallowed by the overwhelming green.

“Son of a-” Muttering further obscenities under her breath, Raven morphed the impractical heels off her shoes and took up pursuit of her child charge. Then, when she saw that there was no way she would be able to keep up with him, she reverted to her natural form and took to the air. She’d be damned if she got her source of income killed _now_ , after five whole months of meticulously avoiding said misfortune like a pro.

A trail of trampled-down fern leaves and broken fir twigs finally set her on the right scent. The sound of breaking wood beyond a wall of tree trunks had to be Charles – only a child of his naiveté would make as much noise in a forest populated by wolf packs and face-eating wolpertingers. Back in her human-adjacent form, Raven squeezed between the trees- and stumbled out onto a clearing in the otherwise dense woodland.

Piles of toppled boulders lay strewn across the glade, while others were still neatly stacked into walls, doorways and stairs leading into the airy nowhere. It was the ruin of a castle, long since abandoned and left for the forest to reclaim.

“Charles.” With her inhuman swiftness which others found disturbing and she simply practical, Raven moved through the run-down remains of what had once been a welcoming homestead to knights, ladies and servants. Bluebells and spurges were flowering in the cracks between bricks, and minuscule fairies flitted to and fro between them, collecting nectar and pollen to replenish their stocks for the winter. “Charles! Charles, where are you?”

“Up here, Lady Raven, here!” The Prince’s shock of auburn hair popped up over the battlements of a half-crumbled tower, and Raven thought she could hear her heart give a tiny, terrified squeak. “You have to come! Come see! I found it, I found it!”

“You’ve found nothing at all, you-” Raven took a deep breath which did nothing at all to calm her racing thoughts. “Come down here immediately! I tell you, you’ll break your back one day if you keep climbing rotten trees and ramshackle ruins!”

“But I found the dragon’s egg!”

“No, you didn’t, now come down here or I’ll-” Raven’s breath caught in her throat. “You found _what_?”

The Prince’s eyebrows – the only part of his face visible over the battlements beside his hairline – curled up in a frown. “The dragon’s egg, Lady Raven. Are your ears clogged?”

“I- No.” Forgetting all about dangerous castle ruins and the fact that breaking your neck hurt like a bitch, Raven scrambled up the tower steps and emerged on the top right beside her child charge. “Where is it?”

“There.” Charles pointed, voice suddenly lowered to a whisper. “Look how it’s on a nest of silverbell and sundust petals. It’s like in the old almanacks!”

And really – slapdash in the middle of the tower’s topmost defence platform, bedded onto a mixture of moss, chewed-off flower heads and harpy feathers, lay a dragon’s egg.

In the warm glare of the summer sun, it shimmered like ice, its translucent gossamer shell baring the growing life within. Raven perused her mind for the pictures she had seen in the Common Guide To Fantasemale Creature Studie and the Ye Olde Handebooke For Sorcery Beginners – it checked out. Oval in shape, about as long as her lower arm from elbow to wrist and thrice as thick in circumference and pale as silver in complexion, the egg could only be attributed to the genus of the _Draconem_.

Raven’s mouth watered. Merchants would give up their entire stock and all the gold in their purses if she brought them a dragon egg, and mages would kiss her feet and set her up with a lifetime rent and fulfil her every wish were she to sell it to them, and not to speak of the limitless greed of the _royal courts_ -

“No.” Charles turned to her, balled his small hands into fists and glared. “ _No_. You’re not gonna sell it to anyone! It’s her _baby_!”

Raven growled before she could stop herself. “How many times have I told you not to use your mind spells on me? If you’re not careful, you’re going to break something in there.”

Ever since the Xaviers’ court mage had taken up teaching the young Princeling, no one’s thoughts had been really safe. The boy had displayed an uncanny affinity for mind-weaving and -reading, and he was a fast learner. If Raven had not been supposed to take care of him (and if she hadn’t known that his parents really, _really_ were fond of their one and only heir and would’ve had her hunted down and hung, drawn and quartered if anything happened to him) she would’ve bartered him off long ago to one of the wizard sects or witch schools on the continent.

Now, though, the boy turned without paying her sinister thought process any more attention and approached the egg. Reaching out, he hunkered down beside it.

“Don’t touch it, or your scent’ll make the mother abandon it,” Raven called out instinctively (it was not in her nature to do good, never had been, but some things were just a viscerally corvid thing to do, like taking care that someone else’s brood would not come to harm), and the Prince promptly snatched his hand away.

“I think I can see its heartbeat,” he whispered, pure joy making his voice tremble.

Finally, Raven couldn’t keep it in any longer and joined him like she was back to being that newly-hatched chick for which the whole world was one big wonder. Her shadow slanted dark and long over the egg, and then she could see it too – a black shape, barely longer than her pinkie, busily pumping amidst a mass of grey. A dragon’s heart.

“Treasure this moment, Charles,” she murmured. “In your whole lifetime, your human eyes might never perceive such a miracle again.”

“It’s beautiful.” Charles looked up and met her sulphur eyes with his baby blue ones and grinned toothily. “Isn’t it?”

“Very.” And for the first time in a long time, Raven felt something like affection for another living being than herself stir her heart. She smiled-

And there was a rushing in the treetops and a shrieking in the air like from a thousand damned souls, and Raven snatched Charles around his teeny-tiny waist and threw him over her shoulder and _ran_.

Well, considering they were on top of a castle ruin in a tower, there was not very much to run to, but the adjoined parapet walk with its half-toppled roofing would do. Terror rushing through her veins like cold iron, Raven ducked into the shadows and pressed a hand over Charles’ mouth.

“Quiet,” she hissed, curling her body protectively around his as they watched the dragon’s descent onto the tower. It was a miracle the whole thing hadn’t collapsed yet, considering that the beast had to weigh at least as much as three oxen or about a dozen knights in full armour.

Clinging to the battlements with its claws, the giant beast folded its wings against its back and raised its head to sniff the air.

Raven’s heart beat high in her throat. If they were discovered… She had never planned to end up chewed to death or burnt to a crisp. Charles whimpered piteously, and she tightened her hold around him.

Despite her fear, she saw that the dragon was a beauty. Its eyelids slipped down to half-mast as it scented the air, and its vertically slit pupils embedded in strings of gold and brown widened. Raven felt almost blinded by its scales – they were a cool, unblemished white, akin to the high winter sun reflecting off a field of freshly fallen snow.

One of the creature’s eyelids twitched. Then, it lowered its sleek, round head and began lapping at the egg with its forked tongue.

Raven breathed out quietly. Her arms around Charles relaxed, and he slipped his hand into hers. Now all that was left to hope was that the dragon would not set up camp for the night.

 _It’s so beautiful_ , whispered a small voice in Raven’s head, and she pinched Charles’ arm even as she nodded.

 _Stay out of my head_ , she sent back, wrapped in a minor mind-speak spell.

The remains of the tower groaned as the dragon moved to curl around the egg but held fast. Little noises slipped from the creature’s mouth, and had Raven not known that dragons never even made a sound unless they were in great pain or love, she would have mistaken them for signs of casual tenderness. A minuscule flame flickered from the beast’s nostrils to lick at the egg, growing steadily until it enveloped the oval shape whole and burnt its bed of moss and flowers to cinders.

“What’s she doing?” Charles whispered in terror. “She’s hurting her baby.”

Raven shook her head. “She isn’t. She’s hardening the eggshell and helping the child grow, so it’ll get used to the heat it will carry within itself for the rest of its life.”

By the time the dragon ceased to blow fire, the egg had taken on a firm, metallic sheen. Now, even as the sunlight poured over it, its insides were well and truly hidden from view. Groaning, the dragon got to its feet and for the first time since it had landed turned to give Raven and Charles a glimpse of its other side.

Charles gave a little distressed gasp, and even Raven had to put her hand over her lips to stifle an exclamation.

Stark black against the white of its scales, the dragon wore a deep gash on its side. The wound stretched from its shoulder blade to the flesh of its right hind leg, its edges torn as though it had been inflicted with a blunt blade designed to hurt. Pus and wound water had left dark streaks on the otherwise so perfect white of the dragon’s scales.

“She’s dying.” This time, Charles didn’t care to lower his voice, and ere Raven could tighten her hold on him, he had slipped from her arms and was abandoning cover.

“Charles! Charles, goddamnit,” she hissed, but he scurried out of reach of her arms. Cursing, she got up-

The dragon turned its head and fixated the Prince with its golden stare. A quiet rumble rose from its chest region.

Raven moaned in desperation. She was _not_ looking forward to having to explain to the Xavier royals how their son had ended up as a pile of ashes amidst the cobblestones of an ancient castle ruin.

“Hello. I won’t hurt you, pinky promise.” Charles, the little brat, had even made it so far as to come into touching distance of the dragon’s snout. Now, he was stood there, hands folded in front of his body like he was the most well-behaved angel on Earth, and smiled up at the beast. “Do you speak Westchesterian?”

The dragon gazed down at him, looking about as nonplussed as Raven felt.

“So you don’t.” Charles nodded like it was an everyday occurrence for him to speak to dragons. “I’ll try mind-speak then.” His eyelids fluttered closed, and he brought a hand to his temple.

Raven had told him a hundred times that using his fingers-to-temple crutch would one day get him into trouble when he didn’t have the luxury of time to use it, but she let it slip for this once. With bated breath, she watched as the dragon’s eyes widened, then closed.

A wolpertinger bellowed in the distance. Charles’ magic was rolling off of him in waves, leaving a taste of copper and blueberries in Raven’s mouth, and then, the Prince raised his other hand and gently laid it against the dragon’s snout.

A sound flung Raven’s heart into a frenzy. It was coming from the creature looming over Charles, low and sad and crooning.

The dragon was purring.

When Charles’ eyes opened again, they were swimming in tears. “I’m so, _so_ sorry,” he whispered, and his grief wrapped a hand around Raven’s throat and squeezed tight as she reached out for his thoughts.

_What did she tell you?_

_She’s the last of her family. Her whole clan is gone, and her lover is dead and all her children, too, save this one, and even now she is being poisoned from the inside._ Charles’ lips set in a straight, mulish line. _She’s asking me to take care of her egg so she can fly back to the glacier where she was born and is fated to die._

 _You can’t possibly accept._ Raven morphed back into her natural corvid form and flew onto one of the battlements to study the egg closer. _It’s a dragon. Dragons are meant to be raised by dragons, not humans._

 _But please, Lady Raven-_ Charles looked up at her, eyes so bright and brave- _it’ll die if we don’t take care of it. Surely, we can hide it from Father and Mother!_

During their private talk, the dragon had licked her wound and lowered herself back onto the tower to curl around her last child. Now, she turned her head and laid her golden gaze upon Raven herself.

The dragon’s eyes were dark and filled to the brim with a sadness Raven knew she would not be able to comprehend, not if she lived to see the world crumble around her as the sun imploded. Still, she knew what the dragon mother wanted to impart to her.

A plea. It was a plea, aimed straight at Raven’s sorry little raven heart, as though there was any love to gain from her.

Contemplating, Raven cocked her head. “It will not be easy. Someone will have to be in attendance all the time until it hatches, and afterwards, you will find you’ll have to learn to cast fire-proofing spells quickly and efficiently.”

“I can do that! Please, please, Lady Raven, I can!”

“It will need live food.”

“I can… also do that,” Charles mumbled, a sad twist to his mouth. “As long as it’s not the kittens from the stables.”

Raven clacked her beak. “Will you love it? Will you treasure it? Say you will or I’ll sell it to the next pedlar we encounter.”

Charles squared his tiny shoulders and puffed out his chest. “I’ll treat it like my own brother.”

“Then, I think-” Raven sighed and thought about all the _work_ she had just saddled herself with- “we have a deal.”

They ended up not merely late for tea, but sorely behind on dinner as well.

“Apologies, your Majesties,” Raven muttered and did a curtsy before she installed Charles in his place at the dinner table. She was wearing a more innocuous human form for the King and Queen’s sake – blond locks instead of a crimson mane, peach skin instead of her azure hide and eyes which were not yellow and pupilless but of a candid blue.

Still, Charles’ parents glared wordlessly at her before they returned to their dinner, and she knew that this month’s pay would be cut short once more.

Leaving Charles to make up a story for why they had returned only so late from the forest, she strode from the dinner hall and up the stairs to Charles’ quarters – which were hers as well, since she was expected to be in attendance day and night. It had once again been a hot summer’s day, and the servants had thrown every window they could find wide open.

Raven sighed. Though this was the Xaviers’ summer retreat, it did nothing to lessen the oppressive heat the Westchesterian royals suffered every year. They might as well stay in their extensive palace in the plains instead of tediously moving their household into their ancestor’s castle in the mountains every month of June, where it was only marginally cooler.

But tradition was tradition, and anyway, Raven and Charles had a dragon egg to brood. The heat would help with that.

She tried the handle of the door to Charles’ bedroom – the topmost room in one of the fortification’s towers, prettily made out to host a spoiled brat and his governess, and now a dragon egg, too – and still found it locked. Satisfied with the minor shutting spell she had cast to keep the maids out, she unravelled it with a snap of her fingers and pushed the door open.

The crimson light of the sunset flooded the room, mellowed by the bull-glass windows, and poured over a small bundle on Charles’ bed. Raven made sure the door was locked behind her before she shook off her blond-and-peach complexion, strode over to the Prince’s travelling chests and began to build a real nest for the egg.

Despite the gravity of her situation, the dragon mother had had a hard time leaving the sole survivor of her brood behind. Time and time again, she had licked her egg and turned it over this way and that way, as though she wanted to make sure that each of its sides would receive enough sunlight.

As Raven had woven spell after spell to arbitrarily keep the beast’s wound from breaking up again and to preserve her strength, she had understood that the dragon’s heart was breaking. This was a mother who would never see her child grow up and fly for the first time, hunt for the first time, experience the pure unbridled joy of being alive for the very first time.

And Raven felt with her this single most terrible injustice of life.

By the time she was finished building the nest – in a hamper woven from the finest willow and lined with the softest, most insulating cloth she had found amidst Charles’ wardrobe – dinner was over, and Charles’ small fists came to hammer against the door.

“Lady Raven, Lady Raven!” She groaned, glad that he had not yet been taught the breaking of spells, and went to open the door. He looked up at her with the biggest smile she had ever seen him wear. “Is the egg alright?”

“I haven’t broken it or bartered it off, if that’s what you mean,” she told him and shut the door when he had finally darted into the room. “Careful with it!”

“Yes, I will be,” the boy murmured, mind already occupied with contemplating the egg in its nest of silk and wool. Gently, he stroked a hand over the soft curvature of its silver shell. “I’m sure Mama misses you and loves you very much, little one.”

Raven swallowed hard. The dragon had listed dangerously to the right when she had taken off, weakened by her injury. They had watched after her even long, long after she had shrunk into the horizon, white on white against the remote snow-covered mountain peaks.

Though the days were hot, the nights were cold, and Raven knew that dragons flew fast. The egg’s mother must’ve already reached the glacier where she had hatched, must’ve lowered herself onto a lonely peak of ice and watched the sunset’s colours flood the sky.

Raven doubted that it was appropriate to talk of her in the present tense any longer.

“Can I take it into bed with me?”

“Beg your pardon?” She turned to see that Charles had already both arms slung around the egg and was trying to lift it from its basket. “Oh no, you don’t. You might break it, and you don’t want that - or the maid might see it in the morning. It stays in the nest.”

“But Lady Raveeen…” Suddenly all well-behaved, Charles folded his hands in front of his tummy and looked up at her with incredibly blue, blue eyes. “ _Please?_ ”

She growled. “No. And that’s the last I want to hear about it.” With a definite swish of her hand, she closed the lid of the basket and pointed to the washbasin in the corner. “Now get ready for bed.”

And now there were tears beading together in Charles’ eyes. Oh no.

Raven hunkered down in front of him and took his hand. “I trust you to take care of the egg, Charles, but the bed really isn’t the best place to keep it. But maybe the dragon’ll want to sleep on your covers when it’s hatched? Yes?”

As fast as they had sprung up, the tears disappeared. Charles frowned, and Raven could almost hear the puzzle pieces fall into place as he made sense of what she had said.

“You think the dragon will actually _stay?_ ”

“Of course, he will, hun.” Raven grinned. “What, do you think it’ll learn to hunt by itself? Or fly, or spit flame? You should be glad I’m here to teach it the essentials.”

“ _You?_ ” Charles asked, incredulous, and Raven had to bite her lip to keep from hurling expletives at the boy.

“Yes, me. And you, of course. Little prince with a pet dragon and a raven governess.” Groaning, she got up and ruffled his hair. “You’re going to have the _most_ _exciting_ life.”

(Lady Raven was yet to know that her words from that night were to come true more accurately than even she expected.)

The dragon hatched while the Xaviers were still on their summer escape, and soon, trying to explain all the charred spots on the tapestry became too tricky even for Raven.

“So,” said Brian Xavier without even so much as glancing up from where he was dipping a quill into his inkwell to sign his correspondence, “when were you going to tell us about that stray you picked up, son?”

“It’s not a stray, Father,” Charles said and looked over at Raven for support. She nodded once, despite the sharp glare the King sent her way. Head held high like a true Prince, Charles continued, “He’s a dragon, and he can spit fire.”

Sharon Xavier let hear a brittle laugh from where she was studying maps across the room. “Can he now? And what’s his name then, Charles? Firebreather? Knightkiller?”

Charles glanced down at the tiny creature hiding behind his legs. “No. His name is Erik.”

“ _Erik?_ ” Huffing, the King at last set his quill down and looked up. “Why Erik? If you already had to take him in and hide him from us for nine weeks, then why couldn’t you name him something more… _imposing?_ ”

In her shadowy corner by the doorframe, Raven almost groaned. _Of course_ , the Xaviers wouldn’t think twice about having a dragon at their disposal, save when it came to its naming – all they ever thought about was appearances. The old traditions and magick meant nothing to them.

“Well-” Crooning softly under his breath like Raven had taught him to do, Charles bent down and gathered Erik up in his arms- “he kept making that noise, and we thought he was trying to tell us his name. It turned out he was just having a small cold and the sound is how he sneezes, but it had already stuck.”

Smiling softly despite herself, Raven watched as Erik curled into Charles’ embrace. The picture brought back a whole load of memories – as soon as the first cracks had started to appear in the egg’s shell, nothing could have possibly moved Charles from its side. Not breakfast, not dinner, not his parents requesting his presence, and in the end, Raven had lied to them and said that the Prince was sick and desperately needed rest and – most important of all – peace and quiet. No one was to enter his chambers until she gave her thumbs-up.

So it had come that the dragon had hatched in the plain moonlight filtering in through the window of Charles’ bedroom, with a prince and a raven governess waking by its side. Chirping and twittering, it had chipped away at the eggshell, had struggled forever and ever – as it had seemed both to Charles and Raven back then – until finally it had slumped on the covers of Charles’ bed, panting and exhausted and covered in colourless sludge. During the hatching, Raven had had to hold Charles back from helping several times. Again and again she told him that in order to grow up strong and healthy, the dragon had to get through this first challenge of his still young life on its own.

Afterwards, Raven had whisked the dragon cub up in a swathe of towels and given Charles a wet cloth with which to clean it – it was a poor substitute for its mother’s tongue, but it would have to do.

Charles had done as he was told, had gently pecked the dragon’s snout and wiped it until it was clean, and they had been inseparable since.

“Please, please, Father, Mother,” Charles was saying now and turning from one parent to the other, “can I keep him? I really want to keep him!”

Brian Xavier looked over at Sharon Xavier, who in turn raised an eyebrow at Raven.

She shrugged. “What pet could ever be more befitting to a Prince than a real, genuine dragon?”

From the safety of Charles’ arms, Erik gave an approving purr. With his moonshine eyes and stately purple scales, he did indeed make a most endearing and droll picture.

“If it ever burns down the castle,” the Queen stated matter-of-factly, “it will be flogged and then driven away like a wild beast.”

“Our castles are made from stone, Sharon dear,” the King muttered under his breath, but it was not before long that he turned back to Charles and gave a resigned nod. “Well, you’ll keep it, but you heard your mother – no burning down castles! Or anything, for that matter.”

“Thank you, thank you, yes! He’ll be the bestest-behaved dragon in all of history!” Smiling wide in triumph, Charles rushed first to his father, then to his mother for an embrace. Erik protested weakly as he was caught between the Prince’s meagre chest and Queen Sharon’s bosom, but Raven knew he was used to much wilder treatment – it was not for nothing that Charles and his dragon pet had developed a rather violent variant of hide-and-seek.

When Raven thought Charles had gotten himself excited enough for the evening, she called, “It’s bedtime for all the little princes and dragons, Charles.”

“Nooo,” Charles wailed, and Erik whimpered in sympathy. The King, though, gave his son an encouraging nudge and nodded towards the door.

“Sleep well, dear,” he murmured and dropped a kiss onto Charles’ forehead. “And tell your mother goodnight, too.”

“Goodnight, Father,” Charles chirped, his reluctance washed away with his father’s oh-so rare show of affection. Gripping Erik tightly against his chest, he marched over to the Queen to gather a goodnight kiss from her, too, before he joined Raven in the hallway.

Gently guiding him by his shoulder to his chambers, she huffed out a breath of pure relief. “That went better than I expected.”

Charles nodded and fell prey to a jaw-cracking yawn ere he could add anything himself. Erik followed suit, baring a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth embedded in the rosiest flesh. As they climbed the stairs to Charles’ tower, Raven smiled fondly down at her child charge and his pet. Never in her life had she dreamed of ending up here, in such splendid surroundings with the sweetest boy who could have possibly been born to the world – and a dragon on top.

Her hands were infinitely gentle when she pulled the covers over Charles and tucked them around Erik, who was curled under the boy’s chin like a living, breathing foulard. When the Prince requested a last goodnight kiss – already half-asleep, his voice drowsy and quiet – she did not object.

Softly, her lips bussed against the crown of his head, and his breathing evened out. Erik the dragon looked up at Raven with his big silver eyes.

“Do you want one too?” she whispered, and he purred. Heart soaring, she pecked him on the snout, before she leaned back and watched him follow Charles into the realm of dream.

Below, the castle lay quiet and still. Raven morphed into her natural form and quietly flew across the room to perch on the windowsill. The full moon poured its light through the window, over her waking form and the slumbering shapes of the boy and the dragon.

And for one silvern, unending moment, everything in the world was right.

Raven got to see Charles and Erik’s friendship last for a whole of six years. They shared the most intimate bond she had ever encountered between any two living beings, and to the borders of Westchester and beyond, they were known for their inseparability. During ceremonies, Erik would lounge curled up at Charles’ feet, wings tidily folded on his back; during dinner, he would beg for scraps from his Prince’s plate; and during Charles’ lessons in spell-casting, calculus and diplomacy, the dragon would mirror Charles’ utterly bored expression.

They had found out his throat could form human sounds and words – one afternoon, while Charles had been dozing off over the basic arithmetical operations, Erik had drily supplied the answer Raven had so desperately wanted to elicit. She had ruined her dress with the ink she had spilled at hearing a bloody _dragon_ say, “Half and half makes one” – but really, she should not have been surprised.

Erik rarely acted up, rarely used human language to whine, and all in all was the most well-behaved and droll companion Prince Charles could have ever wished for. Raven taught him to fly, and Charles to lie and play.

However, despite all of the King and Queen’s protests and Raven’s best efforts, Erik would not be deterred from crawling into bed with Charles every evening. And as both he and the boy who raised him grew up, Raven had the royal carpenters build sturdier and sturdier bedframes – of ebony and oak, never from pure iron, since metal had adopted the uncanny habit of twisting into the most peculiar shapes any time a mildly excited or irritated Erik came near it.

And then there was the Royal Jewellery Box Incident.

On occasions, when Charles’ attention-lavishing nature became too much even for an adolescent dragon, Erik would retire to his master’s chambers – or at least Raven thought he did. Until one day, she passed Queen Sharon’s quarters while the Lady of the house was getting ready for a minor ball on one of the nobles’ county estates, went to open her travel-chest-sized jewellery box and pushed a piercing scream of fright.

Raven was through the open door and by the Queen’s side in the blink of an eye.

“Your Majesty,” she gasped and caught the woman as she swayed, pale as a porcelain doll, “what has happened? Are you injured?”

Wordlessly, the Queen shook her head until she had drawn enough breath into her lungs to answer. “I am very much fine, thank you, Lady Raven. I just… Oh, sometimes I wished Charles was a little more careful with where he puts his toys.”

Raven looked down- and was promptly met with a silver-eyed stare.

At that time, Erik had barely been bigger than a housecat. He fitted perfectly into Charles’ arms, onto Raven’s lap – and in this case, into the Queen’s jewellery box.

“Erik,” Raven bellowed, “ _out!_ ”

Groaning and growling, the dragon cub unfurled from where he lay atop an assortment of gold necklaces, silver earrings and diamond pendants and slunk out of the chest. Raven put her hands on her hip.

“The seal ring you think you’re hiding from me – spit it out.”

Erik gave a sad squeak and dropped the solid gold ring onto the floor. Raven bent down, unbothered by the dragon spit staining her fingers, and wiped it clean on her frock coat. When she straightened up, the Queen was gazing at Erik with something akin to wonder mellowing her gaze.

“He’s trying to hoard, isn’t he?” Sharon Xavier asked.

Raven sighed and nodded. “It’s in his nature. Any valuables he finds, he must covet and guard. Charles has been keeping him busy, but I doubt you will be able to keep him out of your room, your Majesty.”

Queen Sharon said nothing, just kept looking at her son’s pet with that motherly softness in her eyes, and Raven knew the dragon had at last wormed his way into her heart.

Sat up on his hind legs like he had never done any wrong in his life, Erik gazed back up at the Queen. Then, he chittered and made to scuttle from the room.

“Oh no. No, no, no.” Sharon Xavier gathered up her skirts and stepped into his way. “You have hereby pledged yourself to be my very own treasurer of the queenly jewellery box. I’ll have the guards bring it up to Charles’ room and remove all flammable material, and then you’ll look to it that no one steals even one ring, yes?” And with a flourish, she leaned down and fastened the necklace she had been about to don around the dragon’s neck.

Raven’s heart grew thrice its size as Erik purred, head held high and proud, and gazed admiringly at the Queen. Only when Charles’ voice filtered through the doorway and demanded that Erik come at once, that he had discovered the most wonderful butterfly on the windowsill in the library and that he wanted to share his discovery with his, quote, ‘bestest friend’, only then did Erik hurry out of the room, neck gracefully arched and wings spread in anticipation.

“You have just made an ally for life, my Queen,” Raven told Sharon Xavier with a small smile. “He will never forget this good deed.”

The Queen sniffed proudly even as she went to ring for a servant who would execute her order. “I should hope so. After all, dragons are meant to be loyal, and it should shame me if Charles’ love was wasted on an ungrateful creature.”

And so it came that Erik’s little treasure-hoarding spree in the queen’s jewellery box was amply rewarded, and Erik and Charles grew up in blissful peace and harmony until the Xaviers’ downfall.

Charles was thirteen and Erik was six when King Brian Xavier went to sleep one dreary winter evening and did not wake up come morning.

Raven received the news first-hand, barely a heartbeat after she had woken Charles and his pet dragon so they could wash and dress before breakfast. Angel, the Queen’s personal fairy maidservant, had hammered at the door to the Prince’s chambers until Raven had opened up, and then she had collapsed in a heap on the couch in the corner where Charles’ drawings and vocabulary lists from the day before were still strewn out.

“Lady Raven,” she whispered, her face a deathly grey, “the most horrible thing has happened.” And when she felt all three pairs of eyes in the room trained on her, she said, “I’m sorry, my Prince, but your father, the King… he is gone. He is no more.”

Raven’s knees weakened like jelly. Charles, however, wore an eerily unaffected expression as she glanced over at him.

“I think, Lady Raven,” he said and bowed his head, “Erik and I will now go to wash and dress like you told us.” And without another word, he was across the room and vanished into the bathroom, Erik hot on his heels.

“Oh, the poor boy,” Angel muttered, wringing her hands. “His mother is in a stupor, she just can’t believe it – nobody can, really – you see, the King was all smiles and laughter still yesterday evening, how could this have happened – and the Prince is still too young, far too young to carry the burden-”

“Shut up,” Raven hissed. She pinched the bridge of her nose, pressing down on the faint twinge in her gut. _This_ changed everything. _This_ was all what she had hoped would never happen – for the King to die and leave the Queen bereaved while she was still employed by them. While Charles was still nothing more but a child.

Angel took a shuddery breath. “The doctors say he died from natural causes-”

“-but of course, no one believes them. Yes, yes, why should they.” Hands balled into fists, Raven could barely keep from reverting to her corvid form to pace up and down the room. From the bathroom came the quiet sound of running water. “That new advisor he took on last year, he has a way with poison, I heard. And he’s been giving the Queen the eye when he thought no one was looking, and now that she’s in mourning and vulnerable…” She didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to.

“And no one will be able to prove it,” Angel whispered, blank fear making her eyes go wide. She, too, would be affected if the Queen took Kurt Marko as her next husband and made him the ruler of Westchester. The Markos were not known for their good intentions towards all beings supernatural, while Queen Sharon had loved Brian Xavier with such intensity that she would be driven mad and powerless in his absence.

From the hallway came a clamour of voices, and Angel jumped up in fright. “Oh, I’d better go. They’re putting together a board of inquiry, and the staff will be interrogated soon as to where we’ve been last night, what we’ve done…”

“Run along.” Raven did not even attempt to sound in the least compassionate. “Charles is still expected for breakfast.”

Shooting her an accusatory look like a wounded animal, Angel got up and stormed from the room without another word.

Raven’s little ravenheart beat frantically in her chest. A cold sweat had broken on her palms and her forehead. She was struggling to breathe right.

“Charles? Erik!” she called at last, striding over to the bathroom door to open it, “Are you two quite ready? It’s time-”

The rest of her sentence got stuck in her throat.

The washcloth by the basin lay as she had prepared it before waking Charles and Erik, and the soap and clean tunic she had laid out were untouched. The window – barely narrow enough for Erik to squeeze through, now that he was about as large and long as a month-old foal – was thrown wide open, and the winter breeze was fogging up against the mirror.

Huddled on the floor cowered Charles, his arms thrown desperately around Erik as though he was hugging him for the last time. When he looked up at Raven, his eyes shimmered bright with unshed tears.

“You have to leave,” he whispered, and Erik keened and buried himself further into Charles’ arms, “you have to leave, Lady Raven, and you have to take him with you.”

Raven’s heart battered against her ribcage.

She was watching her evilest nightmares come true.

“I don’t have to do _anything_ ,” she hissed and hurried over to slam the window closed. “Who are you to decide on both our fate?”

At last, a single flawless tear detached itself from Charles’ eyelashes and meandered down his cheek, sparkling in the moonlight. Erik, all graceful angles and purple glints, craned his neck and ever-so-gently caught it with his tongue.

“I love you, boy,” Charles murmured, his lower lip wobbling as he pressed a kiss to Erik’s snout. Then, he turned his sapphire gaze on Raven.

“I am so very sorry, Lady Raven, but please, trust me this one time. You won’t ever find calm again if you stay here, only pain and torment – they want you harm. And Erik…” With an affection which went beyond Raven’s imagination, he caressed the base of his dragon’s magnificent wings, drawing purrs of pleasure from his throat, and cupped his heavy-lidded head in his small, twelve-year-old hand. “They’ll enslave him. They’ll kill you, and they’ll enslave him to hunt others like you down. He knows this, too, and he understands why he must go – don’t you?”

With an adoration no mortal could hope to understand, Erik looked up at his master. His moonshine eyes did not even once seek out Raven as he croaked, voice rusty from disuse, “I do, dearheart.”

Raven felt her resolve falter like reed in the wind. It was true. The old King and the Queen had just barely tolerated her, because she was the only one who could get through to Charles at the end of the day, but change was in the air. She would not be able to hold her position for much longer, and the shadows in the royal palace hid knives and bloodlust.

“How could you possibly know for sure?” she croaked weakly – a final attempt at putting off the inevitable.

The Prince glanced at her as though she had lost her mind, just like his mother. “I can read thoughts, Lady Raven. And if only I had been less prudish about it, I could have stopped all this from happening.”

“Oh, sweet child.” As her last resistance crumbled, Raven dropped to her knees and gathered the dragon and the boy up in her azure arms. “Don’t blame yourself. Do anything you like – kill the ones who murdered your Father, send them to Hel and back – but don’t blame yourself. It has been done, and beating yourself up about it won’t change anything.”

“Thank you. It was nu-nice knowing you, L-Lady Raven,” Charles whispered as at last, the tears began to flow in earnest. “I’d mu-make them forget their o-own heads if I c-could, but th-they’ve got mages, too, and I’m su-so weak-”

Raven just held him and a sadly purring Erik, warm and safe one last time in her embrace, and said nothing until the sobbing died down.

Charles took a deep shuddery breath, wiping his eyes which were red and puffy. Dawn was greying the horizon outside.

“You ought to go,” he muttered. “Take anything you need, but don’t forget Erik. I’ll-” He nudged the dragon in question in the flank. “You. Go get the seal ring on the nightstand, please.” And when Erik had hurried to do so, Charles turned an inquisitive eye upon Raven.

She frowned. “You’re going to do a thing I’d advise against, aren’t you?”

“Do you remember how Mage Armando taught me a mind-wipe spell just last week?” Charles’ lips set in a line of stubborn-headed resolve. “I’m going to use it on Erik and me. I heard dragons die when they get separated from their mate, and I don’t want Erik to die! And also I’d miss him too much.”

Raven tastefully refrained from explaining the nuanced meanings of the term ‘mate’ to the Prince. Instead, she stared at him as though he had gone mad.

“You can’t be serious,” she said at last. “Charles, if you could hear yourself right now-”

“I could mind-wipe you, too,” he offered hastily.

Raven bared her teeth in a snarl. “Don’t you _dare_.”

“Oh. Alright.” Dejected, the Prince lowered his eyes.

A charged silence descended. Outside, the winter wind howled, coarse against the palace walls, and from the bedroom came the clicking of Erik’s claws on the stone floor.

Swiftly, Raven leaned down and pecked Charles’ forehead. “Do well, my Prince,” she muttered, “and godspeed.”

He smiled bravely up at her, and then Erik had slunk through the door and was holding the Xaviers’ seal ring out for Charles to take.

“You keep it, love,” the boy muttered, new tears swimming in his eyes. He leaned down and hugged the dragon’s magnificent neck and wings tightly, tightly. “I love you. _I love you_.”

Erik’s inquisitive curr was left unanswered as Charles stormed from the bathroom, whimpering quietly, and closed the door behind himself.

Raven stared down at Erik and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

A tinkle like from silver bells sounded from far, far away, and the joyful expectation bled from Erik’s gaze. He looked about himself, suddenly seeming so utterly out of place in this man-made housing as an acorn in a chest of diamonds. The brazen bathtub began to groan.

Finally, the dragon turned his moonshine gaze on Raven.

“Where am I?”

“In the wrong place.” Raven swallowed back the tears which were pricking her eyes. “Come with me. I shall take you home and keep you safe.”

Her bones groaned in agony as she changed into her true form, and the hinges of the bathroom window creaked when she pushed it open with her beak and turned her head to see if Erik was following. The muted glow of dawn made her plumage appear ashen against the white expanse of snow in the distance.

They plunged into the frigid morning air, Raven with Erik hot on her heels, and soared East, towards where Raven knew lay magick-friendly settlements with warm taverns and bustling markets. The sun peeked over the horizon. Behind her, Raven could hear Erik’s wails of abandonment.

Until she didn’t hear them anymore.

“Erik?” She turned around, flew circle after circle over the sparsely shrubby plain where she had last seen him upon glancing over her shoulder. Fear rose in her heart – she had broken the one promise Charles had taken from her, barely an hour after she had given it. “Erik!”

But she received no answer, and when she felt that she would be wasting resources if she continued searching, she gave up. She took off and flew into the direction of the rising sun, into the far nothing.

In her chest, her sorry little ravenheart had shattered into a thousand pieces.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and especially comments are very welcome and will be met with love!


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